Looking for articles on Atari 7800/Lynx sales, other old consoles etc.

[Leeroy ST]

I've been trying to clean up Wikipedia, which takes a long time due to the elites trying to implement double standards on sources or if it goes against "popular perception" (even if it's wrong objectively) so I was hoping you guys could help out.

The Atari 7800 is a console I remember seeing articles for on varies websites over a decade ago, and some on this site just a few years ago, however they have become impossible to find. I'm talking magazine or newspaper scans that showed sales results for the Atari 7800 and the Lynx.I'm hoping some of the poster that used to be in those threads can find those articles or post new ones.

I know that the 7800 sold over 1 million by mid 1988 before the holiday season, and am aware it outsold the Master system in the US which only sold 1.5 million or less by 1990. I need something that shows what sales there were after 1988. The old Atari figures of 3.7 million turned out to be a misunderstanding since it included software in the sales and Atari themselves stated they only had the budget to produce 100k units in 1986 during launch. I also used to see sales for a coupe European countries and japan, however I can't find them anymore.

For the Lynx, I used to see articles about how it sold over 4 an 5 million, and articles on European sales were it did decent, and japanese sales, were I think it sold less than 30k. Of course I can't find them anymore but maybe people here no where to look to find them. If you have any articles on it being profitable (or the 7800 as well), or a breakdown from the regular Lynx to the Lynx II that would be cool as well.

For bonus, any articles about the 3DO, including mentions about how it's doing in the market, sales numbers, general impressions, or any sort of hype article would be appreciated.


Things are becoming harder and harder to find these days, a lot of the big news papers lock their archives behind paywalls and poor search engines now, and Google screwing over Google Newspaper users years ago still feel the effects today.

It took nearly 3 years for me and some others, many banned, to fix the CD-i page with FACTS, and now that there's more leverage I want to fix other pages as well.

In fact, if you have any information on sales or possibly market articles about anticipation or success of majors titles for any of the American consoles pre-xbox that I'm forming a major team to try and control the quality of articles and making sure they are accurate.

If you are able to contribute I greatly appreciate it.

[fiddlepaddle]

You're fighting an uphill battle. It's sad, but online information is becoming generally less reliable as time goes on. Eventually, Google or Facebook or Amazon will buy Wikipedia and it will turn into primarily promotional material for wide consumption.

[jhd]

 

Have you considered reviewing the actual print magazines? Several years ago, I reviewed Business Week and Fortune magazine from the early-1980s for coverage of the video game market/industry. As far as I am aware, none of these magazines have been digitized, so I went to the library (two different libraries, actually) and reviewed the original issues on microfiche. (Does Wikipedia accept references to print sources?)

 

It was very time consuming as the only "search engine" was the original table of contents for each issue of the magazine. That said, I found discussions of unreleased games, industry interviews, and lots of other information that was not available online.

 

Keep in mind, however, that the sales figures that you find in the public sources are going to be best estimates from people familiar with the firm and market generally. While I was looking at an earlier time-period, I did not see any "official" sales volume figures -- just estimates of relative market share and, perhaps, gross annual sales are reported in corporate annual reports. The best data that you can find publicly available may not be sufficiently detailed or granular for your needs.

 

 

[CatPix]

15 minutes ago, jhd said:

 

(Does Wikipedia accept references to print sources?)

Yes, actually. Whe nthe book is available fully or partially on Google Read or whatever tool it is, you can link to it, but else you just put the title and ISBN of the book/publication you want to use as a source.

[ParallaxUltra]

I doubt this will be helpful to you, it's not about sales, though its a 1984 article on Atari 7800 from a publication I'd never heard of before, Infoworld.

 

 

How did I find it?  I went to Google Groups (web-based USENET archive).  

 

In the search bar I put in: before: 01/01/1988 Atari 7800

 

The first result was this post:  https://groups.google.com/forum/#!original/net.micro/-eOFExdQw9Y/DxfzVlfqCnMJ

New ATARI game machine

Group: net.micro

From InfoWorld,June 11: The 7800 Prosystem, which will sell for about $150

 

----

 

So then I looked up Infoworld June 1984 on regular Google search and found the article on archive.org

 

Point is, it's an example of how to find print articles on subjects you're interested in,  I guess in a round-about way.